Various IT services are provided as cloud-based services, where a client device (or an application running on a client device) accesses a given service via a connection to a cloud device (e.g. a server) on which that service is hosted. A cloud-based IT service can contact a client device application, e.g. to notify a client device application of an event, using a short message which triggers the client device application to retrieve the information to handle the notified event from the cloud-based service.